A beautiful voice......

T got his tracheostomy out today!! This is a HUGE accomplishment just 6 days after his surgery. He has a fantastic voice, and after weeks of silence and years of being hardly understood his speech is fantastic! He kept forgetting that he could speak early in the day nodding his head for answers, but by night he was coming up with things to say just to hear himself. It probably helped that each time he spoke we all started cheering, happy to hear his beautiful, husky, deep man voice. I teared up a bit when he called my name out, overjoyed to hear his voice call out “Annah” and to think of how far he has come. Had this ship not come to Guinea he would surely be dead by now, and here he sits in front of me healing at an amazing rate. When I told him that he was healing so quickly he would be leaving us in no time, he told me simply to just come home with them. I told him I wish I could, but I don’t think that could happen, I have a job to do here for all the other patients like him. I told him maybe I could come to visit? He was so excited at the idea-- so maybe before I leave in April I will be making the trek up to the Senegal border to visit this guy who has become family. I can’t lie, It makes me really excited to think about! To see him as he continues to heal, and to see his home would be wonderful. His skin will continue to fall back into place over the next year where it has been stretched to the brink over the last 5. We have to leave some of the extra skin, so that when nature takes over and tries to bring back in the loose skin we don’t end up stretched in the wrong direction. Dr. Gary knows this from years of removing large tumors, that if you take too much making it look better up front, you pay in the long run with skin stretched thin over the facial bones. I demonstrated this with my own face, and I must have looked pretty silly, because he laughed, shaking his head at me as he so often does. One little thing, that seems pretty small when I say it, but really touched me tonight was that he saw me messing with my ear and a few of the other nurses looking at it. I have a piercing that I bumped yesterday and it had a bit of bleeding forming a nice little scab.  He pulled me over, made me to sit down, and he wanted to check in out. Asking what had happened and if he could do anything for me. He checked back on me two more times over my shift-- asking how my ear was feeling. It was just a powerful reminder to see him worried over me, at something so little and silly. It once again puts all my “first world problems” into perspective as I look into the beautiful face of a man who has stared down deaths door, and won.